Because one minute you're a baby and the next you're getting a senior discount -- and there's no reversing direction.

Hit the Floor!

Comment

About this blog

By Exit Only

My name is Terry Sheehy Marotta and this is me now, in what I hope will turn out to be midlife.
Our people were Famine Irish who came here and dropped like flies of the illnesses that best people in the 19th and early-20th centuries. Every one of
...

My name is Terry Sheehy Marotta and this is me now, in what I hope will turn out to be midlife.
Our people were Famine Irish who came here and dropped like flies of the illnesses that best people in the 19th and early-20th centuries. Every one of them had a long memory and I do, too.
Maybe my memory is long just from having listened to them. My mom, my sister Nan and I lived with our grandfather in the house he bought in 1913 and lived there until he broke a hip, had a stroke, then turned up in a coffin looking nothing like the twinkly man who gave us all those Hershey bars. He was born in 1874, if you can believe it. Then Mom came in 1907 and lasted long enough in the world to hate both Nixon and Reagan. Oh, and we also lived with two great aunts both born in the 1860s.
The result of all having all these long-memoried people around is that I remember lot of stuff I wasn't even here for, like about the ice man and the rag men with their houses clopping down the streets mornings, or the guy with the ladder who came to light the lamps on the streets come twilight.
Mom would be 104 now if she hadn't died so suddenly in my living room. All for the lack of a defibrillator, such a simple thing now. And I still miss her as much now as I did that night she exited the party early, leaving behind only her wedding ring and a hearing aid that emitted a series of intermittent forlorn bleats on top of my bureau until it, too, fell permanently silent.
Speaking of falling, I fell for this older boy named David Marotta when I was 19 and he 21 and the two of us are still slugging it out together with the kids grown and gone, still happily bickering away about who left the front burner flaming away all night with nary a pot in sight.
I used to paint my light bulbs pink so I could look as good as people in funeral parlors but now these same kids of ours are trying to wreck my fun, telling me I have to stop; telling me I have to start buying those ugly yellowish bulbs that look like IUDs but I say the heck with that. I also dye all the lampshades.
I know people cuss and carry on with bad language on blogs every day. I can't seem to do that; I used to be a teacher is maybe why.
So maybe I'm ladylike, if you can be ladylike in a sort of blunt and earthy way. I know that back in college when everyone hitchhiked I was careful to do so in white gloves so people could tell I was a nice girl.
Life: what a mystery.

If you’re an old fainter like I am, you’ll TRY blaming the weather when you faint anyway, even knowing perfectly well that there are other factors leading to your smackdowns.

If you’re a fainter, you know that you can faint under all kinds of conditions: You faint if you get too hungry. You faint in religious settings, whether it’s the airlessness in the place or the staying in one position that turns the world so suddenly black. If you’ve been fainting since childhood, you will remember how quickly you became a small rumpled pile of clothing under the pews, and how large male hands would haul you out by your armpits and make for the door as your little feet dragged on the floor behind you.

It gets embarrassing if you’re still fainting well after childhood of course, and the memory of this embarrassment is so vivid that each time you start to feel even a wee bit odd in a public place, you’re sure you’re about to go down like the Titanic.

You also faint when you get scared. That’s what made me faint at 14 when a mystified old-time doc, believing he knew how to remove my two very small warts, drew a small blowtorch from his bag and came at me with it. He burned twin holes on my forearm whose scars I have to this day. Plus, it hurt like crazy, so add that: You faint when you’re in pain. You faint at bad news.

And you really do faint when the weather gets muggy, as I did in a department store at age 19, only to wake and see that all new male strangers had dragged me away by the armpits – because you can’t have insensate young women interfering with commerce.

There’s a predictable physiology to the faint, naturally: You faint due to a reflex caused by one of the above-mentioned triggers. Then the blood vessels in your lower extremities dilate, and blood pools in your legs. Then your heart rate slows, your blood pressure drops and – boom! – you have left the premises, or your consciousness has anyway. it seems that this vasovagal syncope as such fainting is called, only happens when you’re standing or sitting upright. It never happens when you’re lying down.

I read all this on the web just last month in a posting that said how useless it is for people to try holding you up, even IF they add in the additional treatment of yelling in your ears or slapping you. It also said that trying to fight off the faint “by forcing yourself to remain upright, willing yourself not to pass out almost never works out very well.”

Get down before you fall down, in other words. And so I’ve been doing that, and also elevating my legs once I’m down there, which is also helpful evidently.

I get leg cramps at night, see. So now instead of leaping up and making desperate pogo-stick-like hops around the room, I plop down on the floor and put my legs up on the bed.

Last weekend, when I did this for the first time, my bedmate woke and saw the soles of my upturned feet by his ribcage. He peered over the bed’s edge at me. “What on earth are you doing now?” he said in his mild way.

A good long time we are married but still: he will never truly comprehend the swoon. So I just smile dup at him and said, ‘Oh nothing. It’s fainting weather is all.”